by Julia Gray
Perhaps … Perhaps Hobie is right. What is there for me in my own life? Just parents I seem to constantly disappoint, and exams I barely know how to revise for, and a future that I can’t seem to look forward to, no matter how hard I try.
‘We’ve missed you, Ben,’ says Hobie.
Glancing down, I see that my trainers are barely ten centimetres away from the edge of the roof. It’s a hard, straight fall. There are no terraces or ledges to catch me. I’d drop, like a deadweight, fifty or sixty metres.
It would be over very fast.
Maybe I would end up in the Otherlife, like Hobie seems to believe. Maybe I wouldn’t. But maybe it wouldn’t matter.
I sense him next to me, waiting.
Then I remember something Solomon used to say to me, an annoying-sounding truism that I used to ignore: When in doubt, pause. Take three proper breaths. Think about the things that matter to you. And despite the belt of heat that seems to grow stronger every second, and the bewildering brightness as God meets monster above our heads, and the grumbling and shaking of the house beneath us, I try to do as Solomon says. I close my eyes. Immediately my head is suffused with echoes and fragments of the things I’ve seen: the tangle of electrical wire on the Duvalle Hall stairs, Ike’s artificial hand, Elsie’s golden tears. I see Hati and Skǫll, one dark, one light, bristling and blurred in the sky. Pause. Breathe. My mind slips backwards: Metallica. The fireworks. The chains of lights in the Download car park. Solomon’s solemn smile. Pause. Breathe. Zara in the park. Zara outside the church. Zara in the rain. Again. Portobello Road, on a bustling Friday morning. Jason buying the first of my Norse books for me as a birthday present. Jason’s voice. Take your time, Ben. No rush.
I open my eyes. Hobie is right next to me, his hand almost touching my arm. My arm still aches from where he bit me. Moving backwards, away from the edge of the roof, I say, ‘No. Hobie, I can’t. I came here for a reason. I need you to tell me what happened that night.’
‘What night?’
‘The night Jason died.’
‘How could I possibly know what happened?’ he says, eyes widening.
‘Look,’ I say. ‘You’re not going to get into trouble. You’ve been punished enough already. So just … tell me. If I mean as much to you as all that, then I have a right to know.’
A dazzle of blue as Odin and Fenrir clash above our heads. The winds are rising again, whipping the heat into strange shapes around us. Somewhere above us, I can hear the cries of strange birds.
‘I know it was you,’ I say. ‘No matter what anyone says; no matter how much everyone pretends it was all some unexplained mystery, some strange allergic reaction that makes no possible sense, I know you killed him, Hobie.’
Hobie looks at me, then looks away.
‘OK,’ he says at last. ‘I guess maybe I did.’
‘Tell me,’ I say steadily, ‘why you killed Jason. Tell me you’re sorry.’
‘But I did it for you. I did it for you!’
My hands close around his neck.
‘You killed Jason and you’re telling me you did it for me—’
‘Ben, I—’
His hands close around mine.
We lock ourselves in battle. So much heat comes off him, but his skin is cold to the touch. He knees me in the stomach and I sink for a moment, then twist into him, throwing him down onto the rugby pitch. A blur: skin darkening, nails extending into heavy claws, and he’s a wolf again. And so am I. Under the bursts and explosions of Ragnarok, our jaws scissoring, our claws catching, we fight.
‘You … killed … I loved him. I loved him more than anyone—’ I gasp.
He swipes at my head, misses.
‘You loved him more than me … You never loved me!’ I stop in mid-wrestle. Stop wanting to hurt him. For a moment.
‘I did love you, Hobie. I did.’
He stares at me, mute and furious.
‘I loved you too.’
‘So just say it. Say you’re sorry.’
His wolf-eyes are filling with tears. Slowly, he gets up, shakes himself. How we wanted this, I think, when we were young. We wished we could be wolves.
Surtr summons a wave of fire and sends it hurtling over the battlefield. Gigantic, all-destroying, it rises, rises, begins to crest.
‘All right,’ he says. ‘You win. I’m sorry. I’m fucking sorry.’
The foundations of the house are shaking again beneath us. And I realise that the fire, the Otherlife fire, that comes blanketing across the sky in a single, gigantic sweep of such magnificence that it paralyses me down to my shoes, is catching. The roof at the far end of the rugby pitch goes up in flames, as though it’s made of nothing more than cardboard. A foul smell trickles on the winds. The heat is growing.
‘Hobie, we have to get out of here,’ I tell him.
‘You don’t understand. This is it.’
Now the swing seat explodes in a glittery patter of white stars.
‘Come on!’ I yell. ‘What are you waiting for?’
‘I have to stay here. Like you always said. It’s the end. I can’t go with you. I have to stay here, Ben.’
I can see boy again, glowing palely through his wolfskin. He grows more elongated, two-legged, clothed again in his trousers and red shirt. I am boy too, unwolfed. I will never be a wolf again. The cries of the strange birds grow louder; I realise they are not birds, but the crescendoing sounds of battle – the clashes of swords, the screeches of Valkyries, the wordless curdled yells that accompany bloodshed and destruction.
‘I wanted you to stay here,’ says Hobie. ‘But it was wrong of me. You should go. You still have time.’
He pushes me away from him; I can feel the strength of him, even though he’s lost so much of his musculature. Then, suddenly, just as he’s drawing back, he reaches forward again, towards me, and touches my hand. His expression shifts into something vulnerable, almost unrecognisable.
‘Ben,’ he says, ‘am I going to be OK?’
He looks very young and very old at the same time.
‘Yes,’ I say quietly. ‘Yes. I promise. You’re going to be fine.’
I realise that I am crying.
Hobie draws away from me. Smiling now, he holds out his hand in farewell. Beneath my feet comes a vast and hollow creaking sound, like the bellowing yawn of a giant. I feel the turf wobble and split; I look down and see a jagged crack opening up like a mouth before my trainers. I step back, and the crack widens. I see the sedimented layers of the roof: film of rugby pitch, tiles, concrete, steel girders … and something bubbling up from the depths of the house, too: something like blood, or magma.
On the other side of the divide, Hobie looks smaller still.
‘So long, dude!’ he calls. He is still smiling.
‘No, Hobie!’
I’m crying so hard I can barely get the words out. Behind me, I can hear the frame of the door I came through giving way. The roof is slanting now, like a sinking platform.
The last thing I see is Hobie’s white hand, forming, for a second or two, a mano cornuto.
A blast of fire drowns him in a white-hot wall. I just hear him, faint but articulate: ‘The ship, Ben. Look for the ship …’
I make it through the collapsing frame of the doorway just in time.
I wake up, as I’ve woken so many times before, outside. This time though, I am screaming.
‘Ben! Ben!’
A small hand slaps me, once, around the face. I stop screaming and open my eyes.
I am lying in a square of close-cut grass, damp beneath me. Around me are tall green people, watching. Surgeons, I think. This is an outdoor operating theatre. They are bringing me round.
‘He’s awake. Oh, Rebecca, he’s awake.’
My arm hurts. My back hurts. My head … My head doesn’t hurt.
What new world is this?
The light blue eyes of Zara are staring into mine. Her hair – buttery and sweet, like popcorn – brushes against my face in a feathery curtain as
she leans over me to check I’m alive. She is binding my arm with a roll of crêpe bandage, her hands deft, professional. The tall green people are not people, I realise, but trimmed yew hedges.
‘Where am I?’ I mutter.
‘You’re at Duvalle Hall,’ says Rebecca. She is carrying a sleeping Ashley in her arms. ‘Funny time you picked to drop in.’
She sounds a little irritated, but she’s smiling too.
I struggle to sit up. The sky glows with early morning promise above me.
I’m in the maze.
‘How you got yourself right into the centre of the maze, Ben, I really don’t know. We followed the blood,’ says Rebecca. ‘Something has bitten you on the arm.’
‘Hobie,’ I whisper. ‘He’s here. I saw him.’
But they don’t seem to hear me. Rebecca and Zara help me to my feet and bring me back to the house. My legs are sore, as though I’ve walked on them for miles – which, I suppose, I have. I sense that I need to account for my appearance, somehow. But I’m not sure what to say. What would Solomon do, I wonder? Probably, he’d just tell them the truth. So that is what I do. I tell them the truth. Part of it.
As we walk across the dew-washed lawn, I tell them that I am addicted to painkillers – small, triangular things that have ruled my existence for many years. Last night, at Download, I gave them up, which opened a floodgate in my head. I had hallucinations I couldn’t control. Out-of-body experiences. I stumbled over fields; I saw lights in the sky. I made it to Duvalle Hall, recognising it in some way. I climbed the wall. What bit me I really don’t know – a large dog, a fox perhaps. Not wanting to wake them as they slept, to frighten them, I looked for shelter in the maze. My words jumble, tumble over themselves, but they seem to believe me, which is a relief.
‘Breakfast is in order,’ says Rebecca. ‘Eggs. What kind of eggs do you like, Ben?’
‘Doesn’t … Isn’t Ike in charge of cooking eggs?’ I say foggily.
‘Mum and Dad aren’t here,’ says Zara. ‘They’ve gone to Barbados.’
Duvalle Hall, in daylight, is the Duvalle Hall it always was. The extra gables, the turrets and towers, the windows that glittered like fly’s wings are gone now. I look up, and – as I expected – there is no long, flat roof on which rugby could be played, on which you could stand while the world began to end.
‘Boiled eggs for Ben, I think. With Marmite soldiers,’ says Rebecca, swinging Ashley in her arms.
I protest that I am not hungry, but – in fact – I am. And so is Zara. It’s nice to see her like this. As we eat she keeps looking over at me. When Rebecca gets up to pull a tray of tomatoes out of the Aga, Zara reaches across the table and holds both of my hands.
‘Something was different this morning,’ she says, ‘when I woke up. Like the air had cleared.’
‘Well, there was the most enormous storm in the night,’ says Rebecca, hearing us. ‘The power went out for a couple of hours. I was quite afraid.’
‘And they’re gone,’ Zara whispers, when Rebecca is engaged in feeding her child. ‘The angels – the Gods – they’re gone.’
I blink at the kitchen, at the white-and-yellow-striped blinds, the opulent, high-stacked fruit bowl and the polished worktops. I wait for the edges of things to blur. And I realise she’s right.
‘Why don’t you take Ben on a tour?’ says Rebecca. ‘You can show him the new cinema room. Ike and Elsie have been doing a lot of work to the house,’ she adds in explanation. ‘Bless them.’
So Zara leads me around Duvalle Hall, and I struggle to reconcile what I remember of last night with the manicured rugs and right-angled cushions, the Old Masters in their weighty frames. It’s imposing – it’s huge – but not as huge as it was last night. The air smells of wood gathered for the fire, and cloves, and fresh-cut flowers.
‘Zara,’ I say, ‘does your father have a prosthetic hand?’
‘My mother has breast implants,’ she replies, ‘but I think Dad’s fairly au naturel. What a weird question, Ben. Here’s the dining room,’ she continues. ‘They’ve gone for dark blue. It was once red.’
This is where the final supper took place, I think. Where Jason ate his last meal. What did my dad say – a casserole, a roast? I wish I could remember.
‘What did you eat, that night?’ I ask Zara. ‘The night Jason died.’
‘I think I’d just started being vegetarian. I had what Rebecca had. Everyone else ate some kind of beef thing, I think. A stew. Why?’
‘And nobody was ill, were they, afterwards? Not your parents or anyone?’
Zara looks at me. ‘What are you thinking?’ she says.
In my mouth, the word poison rolls around like a sticky marble. I catch my breath and try to tell her what I think must have happened. But just as I’m about to, she turns, with a swish of her wavy hair, and leads me away. I follow her, thinking, I should have got Hobie to tell me what he did. He admitted it, but he didn’t tell me what he did.
How is it that Jason died, if everyone ate the same thing? Somewhere far away, I can hear the plaintive bleat of the phone.
Zara shows me the sitting room, the study. She shows me the new guest bathroom, all rippled marble and eggshell blue. She shows me the new panelling on the stairs. I look for the staircase of last night: that cramped vortex of a passageway that twisted like a periscope. But it’s not here. We reach the landing and turn into the complex of rooms on the first floor.
Zara opens the door of her bedroom.
‘I’m going to have new curtains,’ she says. The patchwork quilt still hangs in the middle of her wall; the American dolls sit like a jury on a special shelf. She shuts the door and we walk on.
‘What about Hobie’s room?’ I say.
‘Do you really want to see it?’
‘Yes. I saw him, Zara. He was here.’
‘You know,’ she says, leading the way along the passage, ‘sometimes I see him too. I hear his voice. But he isn’t here. He’s where he’s always been.’
Hobie’s room is exactly how I remember it. Battle-lines of toys, the elaborate painted furniture stencilled with hot-air balloons, griffins, clowns. The alphabetised bookcases look as if they haven’t been touched. The bunk beds still wear their blue-and-white striped duvet covers, monogrammed with H.J.D. in thick cream stitching.
In the centre of the antique carpet I stand absolutely still, letting my mind go soft, allowing the shape of the window to blur, the pattern on the wallpaper to overlap with itself in an unending tessellation. I wait for the Otherlife to offer me a clue, for the lemony-green Frigg to hover at the edge of my peripheral vision, beckoning, guiding, for eight-legged Sleipnir to bring Hermódr forth with a message. But the room is quiet, still.
‘I really did see him last night, Zara,’ I say. ‘He told me that he killed Jason. He admitted it. But he didn’t say how, or why.’
Zara sits on the floor, cross-legged. She reaches for a small yellow dinosaur and cradles it in her hands, running one finger down its striped tail.
‘I’ve always thought that perhaps he did,’ she says. ‘But something in me wanted to defend him. That’s why I was so angry when you suggested it. Maybe I wasn’t ready to hear it. Without proof, there’s only the fact that of all the people in the house who might have done something bad, and purely in terms of past behaviour, that person was Hobie. That on its own isn’t enough. Ben, what are you doing?’
I pull the under-bed storage boxes onto the carpet and open them up. Board games in boxes, a beaten-up piggy bank, a stack of tacky-looking magazines. I sift through them, checking.
‘What are you looking for?’ says Zara.
‘I’ve remembered something. Something that might help. At the end of Year 7 we were told to start keeping a note of things that we saw and ate and did. It was supposed to help with our writing. I didn’t bother myself, because all the writing I did was in my Free Creative Writing book, but …’
Getting the idea, Zara goes over to the bookshelves. She takes out a wedge o
f Tintins, and then another, laying them in piles on the floor.
‘You’re right,’ she’s saying. ‘He was so secretive about it. But Hobie did … sometimes. I used to see him, writing things down.’
‘A blue journal, wasn’t it? With a leather cover.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Have you seen it? Do you know where it is?’
She sits back on her heels, thinking.
‘Maybe it got thrown away,’ she says at last.
I go back to his chest of drawers and slide open each drawer. There’s something painful about the tidy way his clothes have been folded and kept, unmoved and unused, like artefacts of another time.
‘It can’t have been thrown away,’ I say. ‘It must be here. We just have to find it.’
As I’m saying this, I look upwards, towards the top of the wardrobe. I remember Hobie’s last words to me.
‘The ship, Ben. Look for the ship.’
I’d assumed he was talking about Naglfar, or Hringhorni. The Otherlife has many ships. But there are other ships than Otherlife ships. And there are many ships in this room.
There it is, on the top of the wardrobe. His antique model ship collection, meticulously arranged and museum-perfect. Inherited, as far as I remember, from his grandfather, Hobart Duvalle II. I seem to remember that Hobie was prouder of those ships, more genuinely fond, than he was of most of his other luxurious possessions.
Climbing onto a chair, I reach up for the biggest, the best, the most expensive-looking of the ships, and lift it down.
And I find it, scuffed and dusty, wedged against the floor of the ship.